Vine, Twitter's New Video-Sharing App, Already Has A Porn Problem

Vine's search screen. You
can find a lot of lewd topics and videos here.Screenshot

Vine, the new app from Twitter that lets you edit and share
six-second videos, already has a number of users posting graphic
sexual content.

Vine lets you explore video categories with a hashtag, and a few
quick searches for #sex, #porn, and some others that we'd prefer
not to write down here show a number of graphic videos that
feature male genitalia and recordings of pornographic videos
streaming on laptops.

That's just scratching the surface of the graphic content we've
seen on Vine so far.

The Vine app allows users to flag videos as inappropriate. If a
post is flagged, you get a warning before you tap the video to
view it. But many graphic videos are still slipping through.

According to Vine's terms of
service, users are responsible for the content they post.
However, the terms make no mention of graphic and/or sexual
content. Here's a snippet from Vine's ToS:

You are responsible for your use of the Services, for any
Content you post to the Services, and for any consequences
thereof. The Content you submit, post, or display will be able to
be viewed by other users of the Services and through third party
services and websites. You should only provide Content that you
are comfortable sharing with others under these Terms.

Still, Apple has a strict
policy that blocks apps with graphic sexual content. As recently
as last week, Apple pulled
a photo-sharing app called 500px because it supposedly made it easy to
find nude photos. Apple pulled another
video-sharing app called Viddy about a year ago because the app featured a lot of
lewd content. The format and content on Viddy at the time is
nearly identical to what we're seeing on Vine right now.

There's also a disconnect in
Apple's policy. It's very easy to find pornographic content using
apps like Twitter and the Chrome browser. Sometimes Apple warns
you if an app may have "mature/suggestive themes" before you
download. Chrome has that warning; Twitter does not.

UPDATE 1/27/2013 5:30 p.m.: Twitter got
back to us with a statement saying users can flag graphic sexual
content found on Vine and it will remove videos that are
inappropriate. Twitter also suggests reading Vine's full terms of service.

Users can report videos as inappropriate within the
product if they believe the content to be sensitive or
inappropriate (e.g. nudity, violence, or medical
procedures). Videos that have been
reported as inappropriate have a warning message that a
viewer must click through before viewing the
video.

Uploaded videos that are reported and determined to violate
our guidelines will be removed from the site, and the
user that posted the video may be terminated. Please
review the Vine Rules (http://vine.co/terms) for more
information on these violations.

We've reached out to Apple for comment and will update if
we hear back.

UPDATE 1/28/2013 10:00 a.m.: Twitter
briefly featured a hardcore pornographic video as an "Editor's
Pick" to all Vine users. The video was quickly
removed. Read
the full story here >